Johnny Porno

by Charlie Stella

  “Sorry, pal,” John said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “And you are?”

  John had dropped down to retie his sneaker laces. Annoyed at the question, he gave the bald man a hard stare. “Excuse me?”

  “Just asking.”

  “Okay,” Berg said. “You asked. Now leave the man alone.”

  “The other guy took a fifty,” the bald man said. “He was supposed to get me a copy of the movie.”

  John looked to Berg. “He serious?”

  “Maybe that’s why he disappeared,” Berg said, “he was robbing people.”

  “I gave him a fifty,” the bald man repeated.

  “Then I guess you’re taking a powder for that fifty,” Berg said. “Tommy DeLuca hasn’t been around for more than a month now. I’d get over it, I was you.”

  The bald man motioned at John. “Why I was asking him,” he said. “Maybe he knows the guy.”

  “Got nothing to do with me what you did with Tommy DeLuca,” John said. “Sorry for your loss.”

  The bald man frowned.

  “Okay?” George said. “Go get yourself a beer you want. Tell them I said it’s on me.”

  Still upset, the bald man walked away.

  “I hope I don’t have a nickname,” John said.

  “You kidding?” Berg said. “That nasty prick from the bar in Brooklyn used to ask ‘is Tommy Porno there yet?’ Now it’s Johnny Porno he asks for.”

  John felt his jaw tighten.

  “Screw’em,” Berg said. “Fuck’s in a name?”

  “I don’t like it, for one thing,” John said.

  Berg shrugged. “What’s his problem anyway, that guy the bar? Comes off like a real asshole.”

  “Nick Santorra,” John said. “You’re right, he is an asshole.”

  “I think Tommy DeLuca liked the name, tell you the truth. Got his rocks off being called that, Tommy Porno. This mope just now, the one DeLuca beat for a fifty? He’s probably not the only one. Maybe DeLuca did disappear for stealing.”

  “He really call me that, Johnny Porno, the guy onna phone?”

  Berg shrugged again.

  “I got nothing to do with this crap outside of hauling it back and forth weekends,” John said. “I never even seen the damn movie.”

  “You like magic acts you should,” Berg said. “See it, I mean. The star, Linda Lovelace, she has some humble tits and all, a crooked tooth or two, but she can swallow a telephone pole. It’s something every man should get to see at least once before he dies, know what he’s missed.”

  “That the line of shit you hawk this thing with?”

  “That and a line or two about how a guy should bring his wife some night, the ones still go down on the old bracciole, so’s they see it can be done.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Might work, ladies night. Or maybe a couples special.”

  “You wanna tell this to somebody else?” John said. “I’m not gonna see the movie or bring my wife to see it, I ever get married again.”

  “Fair enough,” Berg said. “I did make a point of telling the mamelukes paying to see it, call it ‘Peter Rabbit’, the movie. Like it says on the side of the film case there, even though it’s spelled wrong.”

  John was thinking about the pornographic moniker he didn’t want. “What’s that?”

  Berg pointed to the film case. “The name on the case there,” he said.

  John looked but wasn’t seeing it. “What about it?”

  Berg waved it off. “Nothing,” he said. “Look, you gotta tell your people I can’t help it the head counts are down.”

  “They’re not my people, George.”

  “Sorry, but it’s getting old, this movie. We can use something new. That one with the Ivory Snow girl’d do good. I haven’t seen it yet, but I hear she gets plowed by a Mandingo and then there’s some orgy stuff goes on. Weirdoes came to see this one’ll pro’bly love that one, too.”

  “I’m not in the executive loop,” John said. “All I do is aggravate myself in traffic all weekend. In the meantime, the count being so low, they’ll probably send a guy out here next week, somebody to spy. You won’t know who it is, so stay sharp. I can’t tell you which day because they won’t tell me, but it could be both days.”

  “As in you-think-I’m-skimming?”

  “As in I-like-you-enough-to-warn-you,” John said. “They first had me doing it, the head-counting, I turned in numbers without knowing what you guys were claiming. I remember a few guys were caught skimming had to fork over extra the next week. One of them, next time I saw him after his numbers were off, he was drinking his meals through a straw.”

  “More threats,” Berg said. “Great.”

  “Hey, I’m not threatening anybody.”

  Berg put both hands up. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just another headache I don’t need right now, spies.”

  “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “I’m warned, I’m warned,” Berg said. He remembered something and perked up. “Hey, you think about my idea?”

  “Which idea is that?”

  “One I mentioned last week. We get that broad here to do a signing we’ll all make a killing.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the Knights of Columbus building. “I’ll talk to the guy runs this place, grease him a few and see we can’t use it, too. We’d fill both places you get Linda Lovelace to sign autographs.”

  John wrapped a rubber band around the cash he was holding. He folded the wad in half and stuffed it inside his front pants pocket.

  “She does something like that, it’ll probably be in the city where they can jam the place at ten, fifteen dollars a head,” John said. “Linda Lovelace is not gonna come out to Massapequa, George. It’s a pipe dream to think so.”

  “I’m just saying, couldn’t your people give her a push?”

  “I already said they’re not my people.”

  Berg wasn’t listening. “Or one of the costars,” he said, “the short one smokes the cigarette while the guy eats her, or the nurse with the big tits. She’d do good, too. Any of the broads in that movie would fill this place. And it’s not like they wouldn’t earn. We charge the guys a five for an autograph or some shit and let the broads keep a deuce of that. Half a these perverts’d drop a five to watch one a them take a piss.”

  John stared at Berg a long moment. He sighed at what his life had become. Less than a year ago he was making close to five hundred dollars a week working as a union carpenter. Then he punched out a foreman and he was out of work. He had been working odd jobs to make ends meet ever since. The last six months he’d been driving for a local car service five days a week and was barely able to pay his child support, never mind the rent or anything else. Then a few months ago a fistfight in a bar over a woman he didn’t know was married led to a weekend job counting the number of guys paying five bucks a pop to see bootlegged copies of Deep Throat. When one of the guys doing the collections was caught skimming from the mob and disappeared, John got the promotion, so to speak. Now he was making fifty bucks per day instead of the twenty-five he made counting heads.

  Dropping off and picking up the film reels and collecting head count money was a lot more work and responsibility than counting the number of guys paying to see the movie, but until his employment situation changed for the better, John couldn’t turn the work down. Sometimes it became a bit much, though, especially having to humor guys like George Berg.

  “Watching them take a piss?” he said. “Where do you get that from?”

  “I’m just saying,” Berg said. “Guys are into porn, they’re mostly perverts.”

  “Well, don’t hold your breath on those autographs. Like I said, the girls doing those movies, Linda Lovelace, whoever else, they aren’t coming out here to sign their names.”

  “Then they should get themselves business managers.”

  “Right,” John said.

  “I mean it,” Berg said.

  “I’ll tell you what
,” John said. “I ever meet Linda Lovelace or any of the other women in the movie, I’ll let them know you’re available to manage their careers.”

  “You joke, but I’m serious,” Berg said. “Agents, they’re called. I could be one.”

  John said, “Meantime, Willie Mays hit his six hundred sixtieth home run Friday. How come you don’t talk about that?”

  “Because they lost,” Berg said.

  “What?”

  “They lost. Mets lost.”

  “Yeah, and? The man hit number six-sixty. Who cares they lost?”

  “You bet them you care.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Put it this way,” Berg said. “Next time Mays homers in a game I bet, I hope there’re runners on base.”

  “I gotta go,” John said. “See if you can’t find some new blood for this movie.”

  “There are only so many guys live in Massapequa, John. I can’t manufacture them.”

  “That’s what they tell me to tell you. Find new blood instead of pissing and moaning.”

  “Do I piss and moan?”

  John didn’t answer. He was already thinking about having to deal with the asshole at the bar that took the receipts and recounted the money extra slow and now was calling him Johnny Porno behind his back. The guy had given him grief the first day John started collecting and hadn’t stopped since.

  “My brother is working on the guys at the UPS depot,” Berg said. “That might turn into something. Another guy’s been coming says he knows some bus drivers are interested.”

  “Now you’re thinking,” John said. “I’ll give you a call if I hear who they’re sending to watch you.”

  “Hopefully you don’t make the call.”

  “They could send somebody anyway. They could’ve done that this weekend. You’re skimming and they know it, it’s a headache neither of us needs.”

  John picked up the film case and brought it to his car. He opened the trunk and laid it down faceup. A strip of adhesive tape ran across the center. It read: “Peter Rabit.” John saw “Rabbit” was spelled wrong. He slammed the trunk shut, lit a cigarette and got in the car. He pulled the wad of cash from his pants pocket, stashed it in the small gym bag he had stuffed under his seat, then pushed the bag back and started the engine. He turned up the volume on the radio to listen for traffic.

  He had two stops to make on the east shore, the drop-off in Brooklyn that would be annoying and take at least two hours, and then he needed to get some sleep. He was scheduled to drive an early-afternoon shift the next day. He also needed to find time for his son, not to mention pay the kid’s mother the two weeks child support he still owed.

  At thirty-five years of age, with no job prospects on the immediate horizon, he wondered if he’d made a mistake when he listened to his mother’s pleas for him not to join the army like his brother. Paul Albano had planned on a military career but was killed in Vietnam eight years ago. John still felt guilty for not enlisting.

  His brother was on his mind as John pulled away from the curb. He had to stop at the corner for a red light, at which point the radio station gave the traffic report. He turned up the volume and learned of a three-car accident on the Southern State Parkway.

  It was going to be a much longer night than he had anticipated.

  * * * *

  Captain Edward Kaprowski, in his second month as captain of the newly formed NYPD Organized Crime Unit of a statewide task force, met with Lieutenant Detective Neil Levin outside the Cadillac dealership on Hillside Avenue. Kaprowski, at thirty-one, was a short, squat man with blonde hair and beady eyes. He tossed the cigarette he’d been smoking at a sewer grating and waited to see if it dropped down. When it did, Kaprowski pointed at a construction dumpster cordoned off with crime scene tape at the end of a long driveway.

  “Body was dumped there,” he said. “Dead at least five weeks, ripe as the day is long and missing both hands. That said, the guy’s wallet with everything in it, minus any money, was in his back pants pocket; driver’s license, Social Security card, a few other forms of identification. Thomas Nicholas DeLuca, a.k.a. Tommy Porno. An associate with Eddie Vento’s crew. Forensics says the body was dumped there within the last week, which makes no sense they held it so long someplace else.”

  Levin, working undercover for both Internal Affairs and Kaprowski’s Organized Crime task force, was forty-one years old and a twelve-year veteran. He looked at the construction dumpster and said, “His hands were missing?”

  “Chopped off,” Kaprowski said. “Probably soon’s they grabbed him and before they put two behind his ear, the official cause of death.”

  “Because of a porn film?”

  “Because of the money the dopey bastard stole from the mob over a porn film.”

  “How much?”

  “God knows. Didn’t have to be much, though. Soon’s this hits the papers it’ll go a long way to keeping the dummies run that film around for the wiseguys honest.”

  “The deceased was an example.”

  “They whack a guy, leave the body so it’ll be found, it’s the only explanation. The missing hands were obvious enough.”

  Levin pointed to the construction container. “Why there?”

  “Eddie Vento bought his Cadillac there. Coincidence you think? DeLuca had a no-show construction job with somebody close to Vento. Started off as a head-counter, graduated to collecting and probably couldn’t resist skimming. Early word is he left markers all over the city. Bookies, mostly. A couple card games the boys sanction, probably a few they don’t.”

  “Forensics gives him a week in the dumpster?”

  “Five to six days. Inside a week, they said. You get close enough you can smell it. Some of what they found inside had liquefied. In this heat, the humidity, I’m surprised it wasn’t called in sooner, the stink.”

  Kaprowski led Levin back around the corner. “You live over in Bayside, right?” he asked.

  “Off Bell Boulevard, yeah,” Levin said. “The only thing left from a short marriage, that house, but I had to take a second mortgage to buy her out.”

  “How long you married?”

  “Two years, six months, ten days, and her lawyer made me pay for every minute.”

  “Any kids?”

  Levin seemed confused. “None. Why?”

  “Living with anybody now?”

  They had walked past the dealership on Hillside Avenue. Levin suddenly stopped. “No,” he said. “You already know my story. What’s up?”

  “It’s called small talk,” Kaprowski said. “Most people have something to hide, they give it up in small talk.”

  “You brought me into this three weeks ago,” Levin said. “You’re having doubts, feel free to cut me loose. I have better things to do my day off.”

  Kaprowski started walking again. He waved Levin on.

  “Except for me, what they read about inna papers, this unit, we’re still virgin,” Kaprowski said. “Least as far as corruption goes. That won’t last, but for now, at least until the wiseguys figure us out, we’re operating free of common knowledge. We’re as undercover as undercover gets, which is why I make bullshit small talk, to try and gauge your commitment. I don’t want or need people aren’t committed to this operation.”

  “All due respect, Captain, I’m the one in the field of fire on this. Bad enough I’m with Internal Affairs. I turn up dirty cops and I lose the few friends I had. I turn up cops in bed with the mob, those cops can reach out in ways regular cops can’t. You want more of a commitment than that I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “I can appreciate your situation, Detective. I do appreciate it. Which is why you can’t blow it with IA. You do your job there same as you always do, except now you’ll come to me before you go to them. I can’t afford there’s somebody in IA already on the mob payroll.”

  “You gonna filter it, that what you’re saying?”

  “If I feel it needs to be filtered, yeah.”

  “What about the feds? M
y understanding of task force is a joint operation.”

  “It’s a joint circle jerk is what it is. How often the feds share with IA in your life?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, we’re gonna return the favor and for as long as I can get away with it. I’ll keep them in the darkest of Africa before I give them the tip of my dick on this investigation.”

  They reached another cross street on the avenue. Kaprowski pointed at a construction crew building a new curb along Hillside Avenue.

  “Soon’s they formed the committee, I had these guys show up in fronna my house.”

  “Those guys?”

  “Chipped curbs,” Kaprowski said. “Last week I come home, I still had chipped curbs in fronna my house. Same chipped curb as when I bought the place two years ago. Next morning the crew across the avenue there was rebuilding it, my curb.”

  He stopped to point at a stocky man wearing a red bandana. “I asked the foreman who authorized it, the fat guy there with the bandana, and he says he was given an address and told to fix the curb. I thought nothing of it, figured it was the city did the work, whatever. Then my wife gets a call from some goomba claims he’s a friend of Carmine Correlli, actually says the guy’s name over the phone, tells her he hopes the crew they sent did a good job and if she needed anything else done around the house, he noticed we had a crack in our stoop out front, they’d come and fix that, too. No charge.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last week.”

  “They aren’t wasting time.”

  “My wife called me at work, told me about the call she got, I came home and took a sledgehammer to the new curb. It’s still busted. I get a fine from the city I’ll hire my own contractor. Otherwise it stays busted. I been haunting this little prick every chance I get since. Got a guy feeding me his work sites so I can show up, give him the runs.”

  “You know the guy IA is looking into runs interference for Eddie Vento, right?”

  “Sean Kelly,” Kaprowski said, “the miserable piece of shit. Yeah, I know.”

  “There was another one, a detective working drug enforcement, Hastings, but he’s been forced into retirement. Kelly supposedly helped broker that deal, but we don’t know how, which suggests somebody higher up the food chain had to okay it. IA figures Kelly got involved because of the unnecessary attention Hastings was bringing Eddie Vento. Hastings was shaking down card games and bars in the area and apparently got himself punched out in Vento’s bar over in Williamsburg. Irony is, now you showed me how the last guy running the film and doing the collecting turned out, it’s the guy replaced him knocked Hastings out. Johnny Porno they’re calling him.”